Fighting The Demons Placed Inside You

A few years ago I went to a western rodeo with some new friends and it was … odd. And by that I mean, I felt odd and weirdly out of place. Now bear in mind that I grew up in a blue collar family, in a homogeneously uni-color neighborhood, and with all the expected trappings of what that entails.

So when I walked into that arena on a Saturday night, I truly felt something very nostalgic. Pickup trucks. Beer. Country girls in tight jeans. It made me smile. But as the night wore on, I more and more felt like a complete outsider. And it’s semi-embarrassing to explain why.

It started with the long prayer, being thankful for cattle, family, and funnel cakes. Now don’t get me wrong, I support whatever you want to believe in, but I’m used to being in a multi-faith environment. So being the only apparent non-Christian in a wide sea of believers was somehow scary.

Later on, the announcer asked “any Democrats in the crowd?”. You could hear the dirt settling, there was such a silence. When he asked the opposite, the roar shook the rafters.

My point here is that the crowd was very polarized and labeled. A few thousand Christian Evangelicals who religiously voted GOP. And I felt decidedly alone being an Atheist Independent. Like I was a spy or something.

My issue, yes. But it got me to thinking.

There is a certain allure to The Simple Life. Where you are taught and carry those teachings throughout your life, passing it ever forward. Never questioning. Where you want for little and your universe simply spans your immediate surroundings. It’s comfortable. You live and die with little apparent stress and the world makes sense.

But what I was really pondering while watching the bulls try to pay back the humans who had roped their balls tight to make them buck was this … I just can’t stop my wee brain from looking just over the edge of that tiny universe, trying to discover what else is out there.

Yu see, I’ve always been one of “them”. 
Those that question.

I remember sitting in a bible class as a young lad, taking it all in but also wanting to know “why”. I was perfectly willing to accept what was being poured into my brain, but I had to understand it as well. Just like I used to take apart major appliances as a kid because I had to know how they worked. Answers had to have questions.

So as I looked around at the acres of whiteness at that rodeo I actually felt a tiny bit of jealousy. Because to a stereotypical eye they all weren’t burdened with those needs and questions. They were content with their answers.

(As an aside, I was actually kicked out of that bible class for asking too many questions and “disrupting” the other kid’s ability to learn)

This Has An Actual Name

There is actually a scientific discussion around this and it’s called Human Imprinting. The technical definition is “learning that occurs at a certain age or stage of life that is independent of the consequences of behavior”.

What it really means is that when you’re a child, your brain is gooey. Un-fused. Just random strands of unfinished wiring. Your entire being is just waiting for some electrician to come wire things up for ya. 

Enter society, your family and friends, your … all white neighborhood.

And here’s the thing … once your wiring is completed, it’s permanent. As in … no force on earth is going to un-learn you what you just learned. And so decades later when you realize that the earth isn’t flat like your Uncle Bob told you at the age of four-and-a-half, a part of your now permanently wired brain is going to stand up and shout “the earth is indeed flat!”.

You are going to feel like two separate people. You’re going to have this debate inside your mind where logic and knowledge describe an oblate spheroid circling a main-sequence yellow dwarf star. And still the pre-wired foundations of your brain are going to say that nope, Earth looks like a green and blue pizza pie with water falling off the edges.

And perhaps with a turtle holding it up on his back.

Why are you going to have this debate? Because that flat earth BS was imprinted on you. And you cannot rewire it. 

Thanks Uncle Bob.

So even though the outside world sees you as this smart human being, inside your noggin? … you will always have these raging fights with your learning as a four-and-a-half year old. Internal fights that you will never admit in public. Because having people know what’s actually burned inside your brain? 

That’s just way too embarrassing.

As I mentioned, I grew up in the 1960s in a completely white, blue-collar neighborhood. Racism wasn’t so much taught as it was just, simply a way of life. The n-word was thrown around by everyone just as casually as the word … oh, I don’t know … ‘dinner’. 

Everyone used that word, the world was segregated, and nobody really knew why. It’s just the way life was. It’s what was imprinted on everyone’s brain as they grew up.

Now skip to the year 2023 and that boy-man has a battle raging inside his head. He knows what’s right and he screams to himself “I am not the way I was raised!”, and yet he never tells a soul about the conflict because … well, because no one can know about those thoughts. 

They’re just too wrong.

—

So, can you “unlearn” what you’ve learned? Let’s ask the internet and see what all of the scholarly articles have to say. 

(type type type … ding!)

Huh … apparently imprinting is irreversible.

“Imprinted knowledge is retained for life. And of all forms of learning, imprinting is the least likely to be forgotten or unlearned.”

(closes laptop) 

Well, that sucks.

OK, I don’t seem to have an end to this story. There isn’t a scientific way to erase human imprinting. So let’s try to figure out something else that works. Something that explains why we hate and do the things we do. Something that can make those idiotic thoughts silent.

OK, here’s my idea.

How about we just stop hiding? Admit what was imprinted on us. Acknowledge that all of the crap placed inside us is not who we are. They are just the things that others believed and then decided to stick into our heads without our permission. These thoughts are just scars that we carry around. 

And we are not defined by our scars.

I was raised in an extremely polarized and racist world where people who looked like me dominated. A world where “all women needed to be protected and taken care of because they can’t take care of themselves”. Where men had very strict rules about our behavior and male ridicule was a powerful enforcement tool. 

I have these and many more scars inside of me. And I’ve been very careful not to let anyone see them, lest they think I’m a typical racist, women-hating, you know the type of man.

Well, I do have these permanent scars. I have these little voices reminding me of all things false like they were a well learned truth. And I’m no longer going to be ashamed of them. Because those voices are NOT who I am.

Only I get to decide that.